Month / November 2017

Listen here. Dark mode isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. It’s what stops you from burning your eyes out in the night at 2am.

All apps and websites need to have a dark theme that’s optional. Because not only does it make me appreciate and love you a little more, it means my eyelids don’t suddenly shut themselves closed in shock of all the white light that just violated my damn retina.

But more importantly, it means that you can design this dark theme however you want. People won’t attempt to fix and consequently violate the beautiful design you painstakingly slaved away on.

Example of people creating a fix that doesn’t work well for every site:

It usually holds up well on its basic task of making the background black and turning the text into fancy colours so they’re legible, but everything else like web animations and text boxes just turn into an eyesore.

Here’s some evidence of how some beautifully crafted websites are being destroyed because we want dark mode.

Exhibit A: Evernote

I can’t deny that Evernote slipping the dark mode function into their Premium plan was sneaky and does tick me off, and I’ve had to experiment with a couple of themes when it came to this website.

Normal Evernote, nothing strange here.

After:

Exhibit B: WordPress

I write quite late in the night, between 11pm – 2am. And in those times my eyes want to die and there’s only so much f.lux can do, so dark mode is my only solution.

…well, that or just write it at another time but there’s no fun in that.

Before:

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

After:

Text section is all white, which kinda defeats the purpose of why I need the dark mode here, and the darkness cuts off randomly in the middle. It’s a real pain, that’s for sure.

“Yeah but what does this prove?”

To the devs, I’m just trying to prove that adding your own dark theme option is way better as it doesn’t destroy your design and it’s easier on the eyes too.

I had no intentions towards dissing this extension, in fact it works really well if you get the colour theme right for you. The best one I’ve seen requires a “small donation” which gives me terrible flashbacks of seeing someone buy £1 worth of virtual diamonds for a horrible life-consuming mobile game that they’ll probably uninstall tomorrow.

(yeah that was aimed at you – you know who you are.)

This extension does work really well, and helps fill in the gaps that most websites don’t bother to do. There are some worse versions out there, believe me. It’s certainly not the greatest thing, but it’ll do.

Anything to stop my eyes from being stabbed by bright lights and blue wavelengths of light that apparently steal whatever sleep I had in the first place.